Soapbox.ai, the Australian start-up provider of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) service automation platform that combines predictive search, natural language understanding and machine learning for service management, has raised $550,000 in an initial funding round.

A 17-year-old who stresses that he’s growing up on a rural farm in West Virginia away from anything resembling a tech hub, Barrat taught himself how to code and build AI programs using entirely open-source software.

Startupbootcamp received $600,000 for the first year (2016), with the potential of following up funding in the subsequent years. The funds will enable the opening of a hardware lab in Kydo, Melbourne’s IoT and Data Tech Startup Space and will provide the core funding for the launch of the accelerator program in 2017.